Rabbits have bid to do comparable jobs:
"Sit with me while I do my taxes (and
make me do them)" ($33-$45). "Proof-
read my wife s novel" ($82-$112). "Locate
a reptile handler who is in legal possession
of a rattlesnake" ($47-$65). "Need some-
one to come by weekday mornings be-
tween 7-8 am to wake me up (make tea,
do some light dishes) so I get out of bed"
($100-$136 per week). "Meet at Califor-
nia & Polk to pick up a box spring---pro-
ceed to walk that box spring to the 700
block of Green Street (by the North Star
Cafe). Please be in shape" ($12-$18).
"Lego sorting" ($39-$53). "I m leaving the
country tomorrow with my new fiancé
and we are not going to be bringing her
real ring with us. But she wants to have a
fake/cheap/plastic one $30 max to wear
on the trip" ($29-$41). "Speaking" ($21-
$29), to which one Task Rabbit re-
sponded, "Can you provide a bit more
detail?"
My book-club meeting loomed, and
still I hadn t turned on my Kindle.
Surely some Task Rabbit could read the
first few hundred pages of Proust and sup-
ply remarks about the material that would
make me sound smart. When I posted the
task, I did not specify how much I would
pay. Within minutes of my appeal, I heard
from Reese T., whose pro-bono sugges-
tion was simple: "Two words: Cliff Notes."
Among the nearly twenty other applicants
were a Seattle woman with a nursing de-
gree who said she d do the job for $8, a
film director in the M.F.A. program at
Columbia who assured me that "decon-
struction of the printed word is my thing,"
and that his thing would cost $227, and a
documentarian who claimed to excel at
pondering ($60).
I selected Susan K., a fifty-nine-year-
old former teacher from Austin. "A Texas
teacher s retirement check isn t the big-
gest in the nation, so I look at this as my
play money," she e-mailed me, explaining
that she tends to work a few hours a day,
mostly helping with research. Her oddest
assignment, she said, was to find a doctor
who would perform laser hair removal on
a client. Is there any work she will not do?
She told me, "Anytime a task comes in
that is asking for someone to be firm and
cuss someone out, I pass." For $18 (in-
cluding the service charge I paid to Task
Rabbit), Susan K. furnished me with five
questions, including "Does everyone
agree with the author in his opinion that
our social personality is a creation of the
minds of others?" and "Is it possible for
anyone to reach a clear and true under-
standing of one s past?" In order to com-
plete the project, she informed me, she d
enlisted the aid of a cousin who taught. A
Task Rabbit for a Task Rabbit! For extra
measure, I also hired Molly S., a restau-
rant hostess with a B.A. in French litera-
ture and an M.A. in journalism who d
read the book in French years ago ($23,
including a five-dollar tip). Her talking
points and questions (five hundred and
two words in all) were thoughtful and
provocative, and she even invoked Cor-
mac McCarthy, disagreeing with his dis-
taste for Proust as a writer who did not
"deal in issues of life and death." I d be
happy to have Molly S. in my book club.
On second thought, she kind of is.
Call it a thirst for knowledge, but I
couldn t resist ordering one more bit of
literary criticism, this time from Fiverr, a
digital smorgasbord of $5 "gigs" from
micro-merchants in almost two hundred
countries. Fiverr was founded in 2010 by
an entrepreneur named Micha Kaufman,
who told me over the phone, from his
office in Tel Aviv, "Our vision was to cre-
ate the next eBay." (Whose isn t?) He
said that he and his partner, recognizing
that a shift in the labor market had cre-
ated a large pool of nonprofessional free-
lancers (a.k.a. the unemployed), wanted
to provide a means by which these peo-
ple could easily become contractors, or,
as Fiverr calls them, "sellers." The regis-
tration process on Fiverr takes about two
minutes. By contrast, Task Rabbit, in an
effort to reassure users that not just any-
body is unclogging their drain or hang-
ing their curtains, performs background
checks on applicants and requires them
to undergo video interviews in which
they must enumerate their skills---all this
merely to secure a place on the five-
thousand-person waiting list.
Fiverr, which takes twenty per cent
of every transaction, has been so success-
ful that it has spawned hundreds of copy-
cat sites---dollar3.com, 3to30.com, and
5dollargigs.com, to name a few---where
rogue freelancers can earn minimum-
wage-like sums. (Good luck, I.R.S.) Ac-
tually, as of a year ago, veteran Fiverr sell-
ers have been allowed to charge more than
$5 for their services, a privilege that half of
them exercise. The site lists a motley as-
sortment of approximately a million ser-
vices, some of which sound like perfor-
mance art. For two dollars less than the
price of this magazine, someone, some-
where, will answer any question about
traditional archery (excluding compound
bows), find you an apartment that meets
"90% of your criteria," send you more than
five hundred cheesecake recipes, write a
text of your choosing on a plate using
mustard and ketchup and then photo-
graph it, plant a tree in Guatemala, or type
your letter on an old-fashioned typewriter.
Yes, but can anyone read Proust? A
seller named Jobgeek e-mailed that a
couple of months ago she d read all seven
volumes of "Remembrance of Things
Past," and that for $5 she d provide me
with either "three very good comments
or five okayish comments" that would
make me "sound smart." Four days later,
I received her list of comments:
1. I personally thought that Vinteuil s so-
nata played a major role in Swann s falling
for Odette.
2. I am always wondering what is the di-
rect relationship between music, time, and
memory?
3. Swann s closing words: ". . . that I
wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for
"Cute is whatever you can get away with."